Christopher Schmidt

Today, as part of a blog post I was writing, I reviewed some historical emails that I'd written back in 2005 and 2006.

I also reviewed some of my journal entries from 2003 as part of my journal post yesterday.

As a result of this, I have realized a couple things:

1. 2003 me? Yeah, I don't like that guy. He was whiny, and he couldn't spell, and he wasn't really very eloquent at all. 2. 2006 me? He's a pretty cool guy. In fact, he sounds a lot like 2012 me.

In the beginning of 2005, I was still a bit nervous in my online communications; I still felt like I had something to prove, and would act out as a result. I sounded like an ass, and I was rarely as eloquent as I am these days. (A standout snippet: "I'm assuming that your post was made with tongue in cheek, but I think it's a ridiculous statement and decided to do what all good people on the internet do: blow it out of proportion in a rant on a mailing list that few will ever care about. (I think I'm supposed to call you Hitler now or something. Godwin told me that once.)" Unfortuantely, the comment is attached to a post which is massively inappropriate epeen stroking, which makes it seem less awesome than it might otherwise be.)

By June of 2006, I had essentially become the person I am today in online communications. Getting together the OpenLayers 1.0 release informed a lot of this -- it was a hard-won fight, but we made it, and in the process, I learned a lot about communicating with a team that was spread over 3 continents -- something that is drastically more difficult than communicating and working together in person. Though I'm still far behind the curve for distance communication, I learned what I know in my email based collaborations in early 2006.

Overall, it's interesting to really go back, re-read history, and pick the point where I feel like I grew up -- and realize that it's about the time I really moved into helping manage my first Open Source project.